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theantitote · 4 years

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A Call to Action + A Few Resources for These Times of Unrest in the US

On the Recent Unrest and Our Worst Fears (Is a civil war brewing?)

These times are uncertain, dire even. A mismanaged pandemic has and will continue to claim many lives and ravage our economy, yet several Republican governors still stand poised to reopen schools in the fall, and economic woes potentially put millions at risk of falling victim to mass evictions. Police and government brutality has long plagued our nation with near impunity and in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the violent crackdowns on protests, we seem to be reaching a breaking point. Police have been seen on numerous occasions assaulting the media, and federal agents sent to Portland, Oregon have been responsible for among other things, shooting Donavan La Bella in the head with “less lethal” impact munitions, cracking his skull and nearly killing him, arresting protesters into unmarked rental vans, and striking a Navy vet with a baton after he attempted to confront them on their oath to the constitution, breaking his hand. Now as anger swells in the streets and fears rise of an apparently fledgling secret police force due to the actions of federal agents, recently threatened to be deployed to more cities as part of Trump’s Operation Legend, a question thought unthinkable just a few months ago seems to be becoming uncomfortably plausible - are we heading for a civil war?

Anyone with even the slightest bit of morality and an inkling as to what such an event would entail should be struck with terror at the mere thought of the possibility. So it is imperative in these times that we do our due diligence as citizens of this nation to learn from history and do everything in our power to deescalate such a situation before our worst fears are realized, all without loosing sight of the problems and what must be done to solve them. To this end I have compiled a fairly brief list of videos, podcasts, articles, and webpages that I recommend all Americans observe and heed the messages and warnings found therein.

Top Recommendations

Note: All podcasts link to Spotify pages however you should be able to find them elsewhere if needed, including most popular podcasting apps from my experience.

1) The Youtube channel Beau of the Fifth Column, and his recent covering of the events in Portland.

I link his playlist of videos covering Portland and how the federal response runs counter to the guidelines of their manuals because it’s most relevant however I can’t recommend his entire channel enough. For further reading, here are a few links related to what he discusses in those videos:

FM 3-24 - Insurgencies and Countering Insurgencies - FAS PDF link

Federation of American Scientists - their website hosts a sizable amount of information some of which is relevant, including the aforementioned pdf

The Rand Corporation’s website, which has more public documentation and who also plays a large role in the making of classified documents for policy makers on the subject.

The nonprofit archive.org free online library

2) It Could Happen Here - A podcast from 2019 by Robert Evans, who has a background in investigative journalism on the conflicts in Iraq and Syria and Ukraine among others, exploring the possibility of a Second American Civil War, what might cause it and how it could be prevented. Though he is rather open about his own leftist bias he does not shy away from addressing the valid grievances rural America might have with the government as well as areas where the true left of America and rural conservatives might share some surprising common ground.

3) Behind the Police - Another podcast and a recent spinoff of “Behind the Bastards” that covers the history of American policing and how it has led to the often corrupt institutions we have today. Also hosted by Robert Evans and joined by the hip-hop artist Jason Petty aka Propaganda.

A few reminders of recent state violence

Tweeted video of the moment Donavan La Bella was shot in the head by a US Marshal

Tweeted video of the immediate aftermath (CW: profuse bleeding)

An update on Donavan La Bella’s condition (CW: distressing images) - “His mother, Desiree La Bella, previously said her son’s face and skull were fractured and that he underwent facial reconstructive surgery in the hours after the encounter. She said he had a tube in his skull to drain blood and had vision problems in one eye.” - the good news is the article says he’s recovering better than doctors expected.

Tweeted video of Navy veteran Chris David being struck with a baton by federal officers, breaking his hand, dubbed by some as “Captain Portland” after the viral video showed him taking the blows unflinching

A Newsweek article with an interview with Chris David - "I want to use my 15 minutes to put out a message to my fellow vets. I also want to use my 15 minutes to try to refocus this whole discussion back to Black Lives Matter as opposed to an old white guy who got beat up because I don't think I'm worth the attention, to be perfectly frank" - He states in the interview that he sought to confront the federal agents on their oath to the constitution when the beating happened, after hearing of the seemingly random arrests using unmarked rental vans.

NowThis News compilation of police violence against journalists from June 1st

Another NowThis News compilation of more police violence against journalists from June 3rd

Vice coverage of the protests in the wake of George Floyds death, posted on June 2nd. This includes a rather emotionally intense moment when the crew is assaulted by police with pepper spray and tear gas along with a small family who were attempting to protect their local business.

What Now? A Few Words of Advice

The times ahead are uncertain and fraught of dangers to say the least, but if we wish to avoid the worst we have to act. So, what do we do? Don’t just hope but organize, strategize, plan, and fight for the best, while preparing for the worst. At the very least and most simple take the advice from Beau’s videos and make your voice heard. Demand the government start following their own manuals and stop escalating tensions even further.

Yet distressingly enough, it seems unlikely that the onslaught of violent federal crackdowns will slow down anytime soon regardless of what we do. Preparedness seems more important now than ever, so here are a few basics. Try to get at least a month's worth of food if you haven’t already and still can. There are several sites for such things, such as Mountain House as one example, however much of this might be sold out or unaffordable so you might have to consider buying canned goods little by little as you can. Prepare a bug out bag, especially if you live in the city. There are countless tutorials and advice on this topic but try to stay focused on what you might need - things like a first aid kit, water, a filtered straw and other purification methods, a way to light a fire and cook, and so on. If you’re sane and responsible and wish to acquire a firearm for self defense if you haven’t already, and want to train but don’t want to have to involve yourself with the toxic conservative dominated gun culture, look into the SRA (Socialist Rifle Association) as they might be offering range days and training in your area.

But most importantly, start networking and organizing. No matter what comes to pass it will be imperative that we develop close ties with those within our communities which we can call upon not only to help try to prevent the worst, but also for protection should our worst fears become a reality. You might consider joining your local IWW if you’re an advocate for democratic unionization and workplace democracy like myself, or you might look into and maybe get into touch with folks like Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, and see if there’s any local to your area or what you might be able to learn from them. Regardless, try to find some group you at least somewhat fit in with and organize with them together.

A quick final note on my blog

I started this blog spontaneously on July 3rd hoping to ease my way into amateur blogging first and hopefully a career in journalism later, however current events have left me anxious of the future and uncertain of what new tragedies might lurk around the corner of tomorrow. I am however, highly privileged. I live at home in a rural town in the South Eastern US far away from the unrest with a supportive family who have at least for the time being a fairly secure income, and am currently unemployed, meaning that while I have no income of my own at the moment I do have a lot of free time, which I plan to spend much of on my amateur blogging pursuits. So if you want to see more blog posts like this in the future, give me a follow and consider turning on notifications and you’ll certainly be seeing more posts like this from me in the days ahead.

#portland #pdx #operation legend #trump #fascism #antifascism #antifa #police brutality #police state #blm #black lives matter #blacklivesmatter #civil unrest #protests

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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years

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Mutual Aid Groups Reckon With the Future: ‘We Don’t Want This to Just Be a Fad’

Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

Mutual aid networks swelled during the pandemic. How will they continue to grow and serve once it’s over?

In the early days of the pandemic, storied community activists and those newly unemployed, or working from home for the first time, came together to join or form mutual aid networks across the country. These groups have spent months building volunteer rolls, creating community connections, and perfecting the use of Slack as a virtual dispatcher. And with states opening back up despite the pandemic wearing on, some are trying to shift the resources and energy to fight a mounting challenge: food insecurity, which will outlast the pandemic.

Some projects aim to rewrite entire lanes of our food system: seeds and gardening advice distributed to hubs around the country, a quickly growing network of free fridges to store fresh food, and fleets of cyclist couriers ready to fill in the gaps. The new movement is also centered around food dignity: letting people eat according to their preferences, rather than subsist on whatever donations are available at a food bank that week.

“Distribution is the number-one reason why food injustice happens,” says Sasha Verma, a member of the operations team of Corona Courier, a mutual aid group that serves most of New York City. “We are helping all these people who can’t leave their homes. Who was helping them before? I don’t fucking know.”

After months managing dozens of daily dispatches across the city, in June, the group decided to pivot to a longer-term strategy it hopes will establish a groundwork for food security, without relying so much on central dispatching or coordination. It set up “pods” of about 50 families and buildings across the city, matching them with couriers who could address their needs more directly, which helps form community bonds. Basically, the plan is a slightly formalized way of matching folks in need of food with neighbors who can help them get it.

The pandemic, and its wave of unemployment, attracted tons of first-timers to mutual aid groups; folks who had the privilege of never experiencing food insecurity saw first-hand how hard it is just to get groceries to hungry people. Verma says she joined her group, a citywide grocery and supply delivery effort that attracted more than 500 volunteers, because she had a hunch no government or charity agency was up for the challenge ahead. That sunk in when she found out the state unemployment office was sending people to the newly formed Corona Courier instead of a more established service.

“I’m not surprised, because they can’t even do something as simple as what we were doing, which is just buying someone else groceries,” she says.

Corona Courier groceries are usually paid for through donations from Abolition Action Grocery Fund (which you can donate to here), an offshoot of the NYC Democratic Socialists of America’s COVID-19 Relief Fund. It’s raised nearly $80,000 so far, mostly from donations of about $25. That kind of small fundraising is key to the future of the efforts, organizers say. Mutual aid groups often have a distaste for some of the traditional nonprofits, which they say are bogged down by bureaucracy and red tape, and that they believe exclude people who don’t fit their specific requirements for aid. One of the guiding missions of this new era of support is to trust in people to take what they need.

“When we think about institutionalized food aid — for instance, CalFresh or food stamps or other means of distributing food to people — there’s a lot of means testing,” Gabriela Alemán of the Mission Meals Coalition, a San Francisco mutual aid organization that started in March, told the Extra Spicy podcast recently. “There’s a lot of questioning of, ‘Do these people deserve it? By what parameters do they deserve it? And how do we give it to them by however much we decide that they need?’”

Mission Meals Collective, she said, wants to instill trust in its members so there are no roadblocks to people seeking food through its resources, and eliminate the “savior complex” of other institutions that think they know best what a community needs. The group has set up a Patreon membership program to keep donations flowing every month.

“We’re not here to police people in what they do or don’t need,” she told the podcast. “I think also people fundamentally don’t understand that under-resourced communities, just because one family or one household might be under-resourced, that doesn’t mean that they completely forget their own sense of humanity for their neighbor.”

Liz Baldwin, the founder of Corona Courier, says her group hopes to expand its pod system to more families in the future (they’re still accepting volunteers, too), but keeping the agility of a loosely organized mutual aid group is crucial.

“I worked for [a nonprofit], and I just see how bureaucracy can really scramble missions,” she says. “There’s no part of me that’s like, ‘I should take this project and form it into a nonprofit.’ I think you lose the ability to really interact with individuals and try to help them in a way that makes sense for them. A lot of times what happens in nonprofits is that money gets kind of weird.”

Food insecurity is not just a pandemic problem: About 11 percent of Americans, or or 35 million people, were food insecure in 2018, meaning they didn’t have enough food to meet the nutritional needs of all members of their households due to money or access, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Advocates have little hope the federal government will help, while state and local governments are strapped for cash and food pantries are being strained. About 40 percent of people visiting food banks during the pandemic are first-time visitors, according to NBC News.

Mutual aid as a concept is not new, but it’s never been activated on this scale before, with the entire country on lockdown and so many able-bodied people out of work with nothing to do but help. It doesn’t hurt that this is the first crisis of the digital workflow era, when Slack, Zoom, and Airtable make complex coordination easy. Picking up an aid request can fit between gossip with coworkers on another Slack channel.

“We don’t want this to just be a fad. We want this to be a movement where we can be sustainable over the winter,” says Ash Godfrey, one of the people behind Chicago’s Love Fridge project. “This is something that 10 years from now could be a thing. We want people to do it right.”

The group was recently contacted by a city alderman to talk about adding a fridge outside of his office. Godfrey wasn’t expecting help from the government, but this connection fits its plans for serving the community for years to come.

“We believe that this relationship will give us more credibility as a movement,” Godfrey says. “While we are a community and people’s movement first and foremost, the more support we can get from those with resources and power, the stronger we will be. We are here to stay and having the alderman’s support is affirmation.”

The Love Fridge is now working to solve a major roadblock to its longevity: surviving brutal Chicago winters. The group is setting up a volunteer management program (which you can get involved with here) to make sure the fridges are maintained daily, working on blueprints for shelters around the machines, and talking with a community fridge group in Canada about how to survive a bitter January and February.

“If there’s a fridge everywhere, can you imagine the lives that would change?” Godfrey says.

Free fridges are not a panacea to food insecurity, says Sam Pawliger, who is heading up a community fridge project out of the Clinton Hill Fort Greene Mutual Aid group in Brooklyn. But they do help break down a barrier: Even a person who might feel embarrassed to call a mutual aid group for help could walk down the street to grab a sandwich from a fridge.

The fridge has been adding some elements to fill the gaps where food pantries fall short: When organizers found out residents of a nearby shelter were not allowed to bring food inside, they attached a can opener to the fridge and added disposable cutlery to an attached shelf.

“I saw this as something that we could stand up quickly to help build solidarity with our neighbors,” Pawliger says, “and as a resource to both combat food waste and food insecurity, both of which are major issues in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill in terms of food security.”

Of course, being able to produce your own food with consistency is the most secure thing. This is what Nate Kleinman hopes to inspire with the Cooperative Gardens Commission, which he helped start in March to collect and send seeds to hubs across the country. Kleinman learned the potential of mutual aid when working with Occupy Sandy in New Jersey in 2012, which was key to helping dig out homes and provide supplies to people deeply affected by the hurricane.

“In a lot of ways, Occupy Sandy changed the way that the official powers that be in disaster relief do their work,” he says, citing a 2013 report from the Department of Homeland Security that praised the work of the all-volunteer group and its non-hierarchical structure. “There’s a much bigger recognition and importance of mutual aid organizations in disaster relief.”

In the start of the pandemic, Kleinman saw a seed shortage coming: Many commercial companies were dealing with a huge surge in demand; others were shutting down entirely. The commission is providing donated seeds and advice for folks with home plots, community farms, and tribal gardens. The project started at the outset of the pandemic, but its goals are targeted at getting people to rethink how they eat.

“Seeds are at the root of all food security. This is a ‘teach a person to fish’ kind of issue,” he says. “If we’re giving people what they need to actually grow food themselves, that’s going to be much more sustainable in the long term at addressing food security.”

The group is working with local partners across the country to get seeds to disadvantaged or marginalized communities, places that were dealing with food insecurity before the coronavirus hit. Unlike other mutual aid groups, which tend to be located in population centers, the seeds can reach people in rural areas, with hubs in Mississippi, Texas, western North Carolina, and more. So far, they’ve set up 217 hubs across the country and reached an estimated 10,000 gardens, Kleinman says. And they’re accepting more resource donations on their website.

Donated seeds are sent in bulk to the group’s Philadelphia base, where they are then repackaged and distributed to the hubs. Some are sent to people through the mail, others have set up distribution hubs in neighborhood libraries and other public areas. Now, the group is focusing on fall seeds: cabbage, leafy greens, root vegetables, radishes, and cover crops, to keep the soil healthy for years to come.

“People have taken for granted that there will always be farm workers and farms producing food, and with the clamp down that also happened before the pandemic at the border, the challenges for migrant workers are very real,” Kleinman says. “I think it would be surprising if there weren’t more food shortages in the immediate future.”

The idea of exorcising capitalism from food access is an ambitious one. But organizers say the pandemic has shown that community-based mutual aid may be the only way forward.

“When I sparked this up, I never thought about, ‘What’s the government going to do for me?’” says Ramon Norwood, the founder of the Love Fridge. “That’s what we’re learning with the pandemic. It’s not enough. It shouldn’t just be the bare minimum.”

Tim Donnelly is a Brooklyn-based freelance reporter and editor. Follow him on Twitter.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/31RetWc https://ift.tt/3hYIxVG

Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

Mutual aid networks swelled during the pandemic. How will they continue to grow and serve once it’s over?

“I’m not surprised, because they can’t even do something as simple as what we were doing, which is just buying someone else groceries,” she says.

“If there’s a fridge everywhere, can you imagine the lives that would change?” Godfrey says.

The idea of exorcising capitalism from food access is an ambitious one. But organizers say the pandemic has shown that community-based mutual aid may be the only way forward.

Tim Donnelly is a Brooklyn-based freelance reporter and editor. Follow him on Twitter.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/31RetWc via Blogger https://ift.tt/3hRhI5u

#Blogger #cooking #Eater #food #recipes

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alexandriatilleyphotography · 7 years

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APhotoEditor; Ask Anything – Photographer Rep Fees, Relationships and Responsibilities

I read the article APhotoEditor; Ask Anything – Photographer Rep Fees, Relationships and Responsibilities that feature former Art Buyers and current photography consultants Amanda Sosa Stone and Suzanne Sease speak about they roles within photography and how their roles work within the wider industry, of which will further my knowledge of the agency industry.

QUESTION: I am wondering if we might hear from some reps, consultants and photographers about what they think the rough breakdown is for rep commissions and what a photographer should be expecting in return for these fees. I currently pay 25% of my fees on jobs my agent negotiates. My rep is not participating in social media AT ALL and is often unavailable to do quotes leaving me to either do them myself or revise them myself if I want the deal closed. I am not entirely sure how many meetings they go on every month, but would love opinions on what I could reasonable expect here. I am also not sure there is much beyond e-promos being done on my agent’s part, I do a LOT of my own promotion and do not rely on my agent for much in that department. Since I am very active in promotion myself we are often bidding with clients I have been pursuing through my own efforts for years before I started working with my agent. Perhaps this is just one of the many struggles of the photog/rep relationship but I am wondering at what point I ask about a percentage reduction if I can’t get certain things from my agent, and what might some others in the industry feel those standards are?’

Amanda and Suzanne: Having a rep requires open communication. Does a rep relationship change over time, of course it does. But you have to both have an understanding of what each of you will do. Many of our clients assume that marketing can cease once a rep comes into play. In our opinion, a rep’s goal #1 is to be there to negotiate, projects and land the job. A rep’s 2nd goal is to help you keep up your exposure, but it’s a role that is not one sided, both parties need to commit to a plan that works for everyone.

ANSWERS: AGENT 1: While every agent/artist relationship is different, the one thing that is constant is that you are partners working toward a mutually beneficial goal. You are a team and there are times each one needs to help the other. It is reasonable to expect your agent to go on appointments and be available for estimates. There is no set number of meetings every month and getting appointments is much harder than it used to be (many creative shops are limiting portfolio reviews to once or twice a year). As for social media & other forms of promotion, it sounds like you both need to have a conversation and discuss/define each others expectations and who’s handling what. If after that, there is no clear cut definition, then a percentage reduction is probably not the answer. It might be time to sever the relationship. AGENT 2: As I am sure you know, every rep/photographer relationship is different. It is important to discuss expectations at the onset of the partnership. These questions should have been answered prior to the agreement. That being said, I think it is critical that the agent be involved in the estimating and negotiating process. If your agent is good, this is where they earn their commission. I find it strange that the agent in question is not involved during those critical times. As an agent, I love this part of the job and know that I create a lot of value for my artists in this area. Rather than a percentage reduction, I would suggest a serious discussion regarding responsibilities and expectations. Even if the agent in question agreed to a percentage reduction, I would imagine that their level of commitment and actual work for you as an artist would subsequently be “reduced.” If a discussion doesn’t work or is not desirable, it may be time to look for a new rep. Good luck! AGENT 3: Regarding our respective obligations, we first and foremost view our relationship with all of our talent as a collaborative one and feel that to be successful, we must have great communication, mutual trust, a shared vision and a firm belief in the value of both parties’ contributions towards realising that vision. We are fortunate to have had longer lasting relationships with our talent than normal in this business and are quite proud of that fact. While there have been and will be challenges, we’ve worked through them due to our shared interests, respect and trust. We strive for excellent communication and complete transparency with regards to what we are doing on our talent’s behalf. To that end, we provide quarterly call report summaries to each party detailing all of the calls that we received pertinent to them, the source of the calls (if that can be ascertained) and the results. In addition, we also provide follow up summaries after all of our portfolio shows, specifying where we went and who saw the work. We also encourage anyone in the group who is free and interested, to join us for the shows (locally or out-of-town). Our financial arrangement is consistent with all of our photographers, as we feel that a common agreement is most fair. Our commission is 25% of all negotiated fees (travel/prep/shoot/post) and any retouching fees not being expensed to either an outside or studio staff person. We are the exclusive representatives for all of our photographers in North America, and worldwide for those who don’t have international representation. We would assume the same would apply to you, specific to your print/still photography business. We are also interested in bringing you motion projects, and given your relationship with outside production companies, need to work out the specifics on how that might work to the satisfaction of all. Our photographers cover 100% of any individual marketing efforts they do or have us do on their behalf, plus the cost of creating and updating their portfolios/sites and any general mailing/shipping specific to them. We see the AGENCY’s primary responsibilities are as follows: – To build awareness for our photographers’ work through consistent and well-coordinated direct sales, promotion and PR efforts. – To identify and pursue market opportunities for individual photographers as feasible. – To develop production budgets with input from photographers and producers and negotiate those budgets with the clients to which they apply. – To review all contracts/purchase orders and handle all billing and administration duties related to our photographers’ productions. – To provide timely feedback/input from our sales activities, in-coming calls and pertinent results. – To provide input on portfolio imagery. – To aid in the development and execution of any individual marketing efforts done in addition to the group campaigns we coordinate. Our photographers’ primary responsibilities are: – To maintain updated, professional portfolio materials (individual and group books). – To provide a minimum number of portfolios needed to meet market demands. – To provide timely updates to their individual web sites, and rep website. – To provide the necessary files and and proofs for any promotional efforts we coordinate, in a timely manner. – Oh yeah! – to handle the communication and creative challenges of high level advertising productions with great aplomb! In addition to all of the above, the only other item we need to discuss is whether or not we will be involved with any of your existing/current clients or “house accounts”, and either way, detailing who they are and how we intend to work with them. Normally, I would a define a “current client or house account” as someone with whom you’ve worked with within the past six months, or on a regular basis over a longer period of time, but am open to your interpretation. AGENT 4: Obviously every relationship is different but it is important to communicate with each other regularly. Both photographers and agents wear so many more hats these days and must keep up with the new frontier, which includes social media. Both need to get on this bandwagon, but need to coordinate their efforts. Coordination with emails blasts, social sites, portfolio shows and estimating projects is so very important. Both photographers and agents need to speak up if either feels something is missing. It sounds like this artist is pissed but may not be expressing his concerns to his rep. This is the first think you need to do. NOW! Frankly I can’t understand the quote thing. That’s what we live for. Maybe it’s time for a new relationship? A fee reduction, no matter who’s offering it, is always insulting.

PHOTOGRAPHER WITH AGENT: I’m sure others will say, a rep relationship is like any other partnership, including marriage, and is based on trust and mutual respect. Without these things there isn’t much you can count on. I am working with my second rep, the first was not successful in my eyes based upon their lack of participation in promoting their own brand (and therefore my brand) outside of email blasts. They did not seem to have a plan for marketing and advertising but instead saw the possibility of success based upon adding more talent to their roster, cheating their current core talent of resources already in shortage. With the second rep, it is the polar opposite. There is a strong communication, dollars invested in making our target audience aware of our talents, and respect for ideas expressed. I have also seen the rep relationship up close when working as an assistant. What I have come to expect is that the talent and the rep should all be contributing to the marketing efforts, and it costs money for everyone. As far as I know 25% is still the norm though I have seen 30%. A photographer cannot expect a rep to handle all of these costs or efforts, and neither can a rep expect the photographer to do it alone (otherwise why would you need a rep?). Once you have a rep, you still have to be as diligent as ever in keeping contacts alive and well.

‘A rep is only as good as their communication, estimate deliveries, client support and marketing exposure delivered.’

This is interesting to look at as this gives me an idea on what problems do occur within the agency industries, and gives me a clearer insight into how to rectify these problems / what I should and should not be doing as an agent. It has made me think more deeply about the agencies roles as a negotiator as well as getting the photographer the job and gain ultimate exposure, and how I can do all these things without letting the photographer down. With future work experience I can begin to learn these roles more thoroughly as well as through work experience now to improve upon this so I don’t gain problems like this. Another element highlighted frequently in this article is the relationship between the agency and the photographer, agents within the article have stated how important it is to create a rapport - and when looking for new talent this is one aspect I will really think about, because as shown above, it can lead to problems if they are not the right fit. Agent 3 improved my insight greatly f into the roles of an agent, with some I haven't seen / heard of before. This has helped me in looking at how I can do these roles and what skills I need to improve on as well as what I should avoid (mistakes) whilst to do when doing them. Overall, this article has given me further understanding of the agency role, as well as what to mistakes to avoid when being an agent, and what I should expect when being an agent, all of which has helped me for the future.

#professionalpracticepromotion

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instantdeerlover · 4 years

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Mutual Aid Groups Reckon With the Future ‘We Don’t Want This to Just Be a Fad’ added to Google Docs

Mutual Aid Groups Reckon With the Future ‘We Don’t Want This to Just Be a Fad’

Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

Mutual aid networks swelled during the pandemic. How will they continue to grow and serve once it’s over?

“I’m not surprised, because they can’t even do something as simple as what we were doing, which is just buying someone else groceries,” she says.

“If there’s a fridge everywhere, can you imagine the lives that would change?” Godfrey says.

The idea of exorcising capitalism from food access is an ambitious one. But organizers say the pandemic has shown that community-based mutual aid may be the only way forward.

Tim Donnelly is a Brooklyn-based freelance reporter and editor. Follow him on Twitter.

via Eater - All https://www.eater.com/21408710/how-mutual-aid-groups-plan-to-fight-food-insecurity-post-pandemic

Created September 2, 2020 at 11:26PM /huong sen View Google Doc Nhà hàng Hương Sen chuyên buffet hải sản cao cấp✅ Tổ chức tiệc cưới✅ Hội nghị, hội thảo✅ Tiệc lưu động✅ Sự kiện mang tầm cỡ quốc gia 52 Phố Miếu Đầm, Mễ Trì, Nam Từ Liêm, Hà Nội http://huongsen.vn/ 0904988999 http://huongsen.vn/to-chuc-tiec-hoi-nghi/ https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xa6sRugRZk4MDSyctcqusGYBv1lXYkrF

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asrarblog · 4 years

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Dear Colleagues! This is Pharma Veterans Blog Post #295. Pharma Veterans shares the wealth of knowledge and wisdom of Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. If you wish to share your stories, ideas and thoughts, please email to [email protected] for publishing your contributions here.

This is further on the subject of Big Fish. They are amongst us and they are around us. We should understand how it develops and how it affects the work place. There are two parties to this process; the employer and the employee. Both contribute to the evolution of Big Fish process.

Employers

Largest majority of businesses start small. It may be one person, a family or few partners. The entire focus is on survival, and to develop the business. There are a handful of employees, if any. Everyone is required to do what they can. There are no specific roles and assignments, except hard work. The organization runs informally. This is actually the most appropriate way of starting.

Entrepreneurs come in all kinds of varieties and orientations. All of them harbor passion and desire to grow big; the vision about big varies greatly, however. Some would be contented with a fair-sized business and an easy life; others think about establishing a business for the next one generation; and very few will carry the dream of building an empire to last for indefinite period, forever may be. The orientation of entrepreneur has direct bearing on the course and trajectory of business, and the people working there. Let us look at it in some detail.

Low-Ambition Entrepreneurs – the ceiling comes early, though the expression may vary. Some are contented with overt transformation towards religion. Some get into entertainment mode at a personal or family level. A large vehicle, a house in a decent locality, children’s education abroad were the long-held dreams. As soon as these were filled, the ceiling arrived. The entrepreneur settles on a sum of money and takes it out in any case, no matter what happens to other business needs. This amount keeps on increasing and is a permanent drain on resources. The most negative impact is that there is no reinvestment into business. New projects and new initiatives suffer; plants keep becoming more and more redundant, and employee benefits stay on backburner. The entrepreneurs remain dependent on one or two key people who quickly become the typical Big Fish.

Moderate-Ambition Entrepreneurs – the ceiling is relatively higher and may become even higher with time. There is no clear future vision other than building business to a moderately large extent. The driving force is money and remains so for the next several years or forever. As a result, the business is built but the organization is not built. This is the big difference which is there between a business and an organization. There are several fairly large sized businesses which run like a small shop. There is no infrastructure or hierarchy. There is an owner and everyone else is staff. The entire business is dependent on one person which is a serious limitation and handicap for the business. Succession to next generation is neither easy nor smooth; it cannot be because the young son or daughter does not have experience, though they may be highly qualified, brilliant and hard working. The evolution of Big Fish is encouraged by the system itself. The sole owner cannot do all by himself and is therefore compelled to develop trustworthy aides. These aides grow into Big Fish sooner or later.

High-Ambition Entrepreneurs – These are the people who usually make it big. They are hard driving, goal-oriented, focused people who pursue their dreams vehemently. Most of them end up being big. The orientation may still vary. Some may grow one business and open another and have multiple businesses, but do not develop organizations. They install their trusted people to manage their businesses but monitor closely. This kind is also favorable for managers turning into Big Fish.

Few try to develop the organization in a way that would not be dependent on them now or even after they have departed. The infrastructure is evolved, policies and procedures are defined, responsibilities are fixed, and reporting systems are installed. The organization emerges which has the capacity to live longer than its original owners. Operations are handled by employees; the CEO is employee and reports to the Board of Directors. Big Fish development is uncommon.

Pakistani Entrepreneurs – Except a few large groups who have a long history in business, all other entrepreneurs have common issues. These may be summarized below.

Micromanagement – it is critical to manage everything, even small little ones, in the beginning. The enterprise is new and fragile. Small negligence can have a big consequence. This is the classic ‘shop-model’. The small shop stays small and the growth is minimal. You would see that such businesses despite being old cannot even support the children, who opt to do jobs outside. However, our local entrepreneurs do not understand when to graduate from micro- to macro-management. The thought of leaving a small portion of charge creates anxiety. This comes from a history of our society where two traits stand out. One, the urge to own as well as possess is inherent. Pride adds to possessiveness. ‘I have done it’ and ‘this is mine’ is what we hear all the time, along with its many variants. Our long years of deprivation, exploitation and poverty adds to possessiveness. Two, the distrust on others is also inherent. We have been cheated so many times by so many people that we do not trust even our own family members. Every now and then, something happens which reinforces distrust. As is said, it is good to trust, but it is even better to have systems to protect. On this count, the entrepreneurs may not be blamed much. The distrust is mutual between employer and employee. In the atmosphere of omnipresent distrust, few employees, successful in earning the trust of employer somehow, become Big Fish quickly.

Class Difference – Before Islam came to sub-continent, almost everyone was obviously Hindu. Buddhism did not flourish much in the then India. Hindu social structure is strictly class-based, with untouchables at the lowest rank. It is reasonable to assume that the very first converts would have come from the lowest and the poorest community who saw a refuge in Islam. Whatever happened later is not important, but our present-day social structure in Pakistan discriminates between classes severely, consistently and shamelessly. Most people who become successful in life make it a point to show their superiority, even more so when they had come from a humble background. They would refuse to mix up with the employees, treat them harshly and pay them poorly. Our ancestors might have converted to Islam few hundred years ago, but our culture never converted. It is still what it used to be. All employees try to curry favor with the employer and are willing to go to any length for this. Some get success early and may become Big Fish, and an instrument of causing further exploitation.

Lack of Vision – it is not surprising to find that most entrepreneurs do not have any vision. They live in the present, work hard and try to grow. As soon as the things start looking up, the drive slows down. A general lack of direction is seen. Rather than focusing on core business, there is a tendency to invest in real estate, get into politics, travel abroad, buy Land Cruiser or the like of it. Many do not go beyond this point and keep stuck in the middle. Some actually go down, and a smaller number finds its direction and moves up. Unlike West, where business owners started small and spread around the world, our entrepreneurs have no desire to even branch out. While, we see consumer brands branching out rapidly, Pharma prefers to lag behind. Lack of vision leads to lack of desire to achieve excellence. We love mediocrity, label it as Good and get contented. The opening lines of the book “Good to Great’ by Jim Collins are prophetic; “Good is the enemy of Great”.

Big Fish syndrome is a reflection of the issues with our local entrepreneurs, their mindset, their orientation and their practices. The Big Fish will continue to evolve, grow and thrive because the breeding ground shall remain fertile.

Big Fish Evolution in Workplace – Blog Post #295 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues! This is Pharma Veterans Blog Post #295. Pharma Veterans shares the wealth of knowledge and wisdom of Veterans for the benefit of Community at large.

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wolfliving · 5 years

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Climate crisis volunteers who aren’t gonna get a lot of money

*Getting your town drowned is really, really expensive.

https://www.shareable.net/preparing-for-climate-chaos-now-qa-with-disasterologist-dr-samantha-montano/

Robert Raymond: One of the main themes that we try to unpack in our documentaries is the idea of disaster collectivism — how community response to disasters is almost often marked by unique forms of solidarity and kindness. We focus particularly on vulnerable communities that are impacted disproportionately by disasters — communities that don’t have access to adequate relief and recovery resources. We saw disaster collectivism in play during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and we’ve produced episodes [of The Response podcast] on Occupy Sandy in the Rockaways and the Mutual Aid Centers that popped up all over Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, for example. I’m wondering if there are any examples of disaster collectivism that you find especially compelling or inspiring?

Dr. Samantha Montano: The area that I specialize in within emergency management is disaster volunteerism and nonprofit involvement in emergency management, particularly during response and recovery efforts. So these are exactly the types of groups that I’ve spent a lot of time talking to. And honestly, all of them are compelling and inspiring to me. It’s difficult to pick one. I think it’s useful for people to know that this coming together of different groups — oftentimes spontaneously and by improvising a response to a disaster — this happens during every single disaster. This is a worldwide phenomenon that happens. It’s tied to how humans react to disasters — we’re prosocial in how we respond. When a disaster happens, we turn to one another, we help one another. And so really, these groups that you mentioned, they are a product of that human behavior.

I also think it’s also important to reflect on the way that our approach to emergency management has evolved over the past hundred years in this country. The more formal emergency management system that we have of aid through government is by design limited. The approach from the federal government is to be as limited in their involvement as possible. This runs counter to what the general public wants, because when a disaster happens, you want government to come in and help and address the needs in your community to get the roads back up and running, for example, or to get electricity turned back on, to get people back in their homes. There is a real mismatch between what the goal of government is, especially the federal government, when a disaster happens, and what the public perceives that role to be.

Furthermore, we also have to think about the history of this system and how it was designed and importantly, who it was designed for. Our emergency management system really dates back to the civil defense era in the 1950s, and it was really designed for a traditionally nuclear, white, middle class American family — that was who was in mind when it was created, and the people who were creating it were from that demographic. And so the way they conceptualized what it means to help before, during and after disasters comes from that mindset. And of course, it wasn’t true at the time and especially isn’t true now, that’s not what the American public looks like. We’re not all white middle class nuclear families. So that’s another way that we really start seeing certain groups of people having way more needs than other groups during disaster. And we see that there’s an inability of that formal system to really address those needs. It’s in those instances that I think we more clearly see groups like Occupy Sandy and whoever else come to the forefront as they work with people that are in those demographics.

The way you describe your interests in the bio on your blog is interesting because it brings together topics that one might not always see as being directly connected. One example of this sort of intersection is disasters and gender. I’m wondering if you could explain how you approach exploring that particular intersection?

Something unique about disasters is that all parts of life are affected by disasters in various ways. And so when we study disasters, we really need to be studying all parts of life, which can be very overwhelming. So we like to zero in on topics as much as possible.

One of the areas that really interests me is gender and disasters in particular. But so too with other demographics and disasters, such as race and class, for example. In the same way that we each go through the world every day with our identity, our gender, our race, our class, our education level — all of those things are influencing how we experience the world. And it’s also influencing how the world experiences us. The same is true during a disaster. The way that we are experiencing disasters is going to be different from one another based on the resources that we have, the help that we’re able to receive, or our social networks. So it’s really important for us as researchers to make sure we’re being careful about talking about groups of people as one whole group. We have to recognize how those different demographics intersect with one another — how a woman of color is going to experience a disaster differently than a white woman, for example. While still recognizing that we’re all in the same boat in the sense that we’re all experiencing this disaster. But the way that we experience a disaster is going to vary based on these other factors.

We’ve explored the intersection of disasters with things like class and immigration status in our podcast, for example. But we’ve yet to really explore the intersection with gender. I’m wondering if you have any examples that might help to illustrate that specific intersection?

One example that I use pretty frequently is the increase in domestic violence and reporting of domestic violence after disasters. Of course, any gender can be a victim of disaster violence, but they tend to be women. We see that there is this increased need among women and domestic domestic violence survivors for needing a safe place to stay, for needing resources to keep themselves safe. The disaster itself very often can drive women who have been able to get away from their abuser to go back because they don’t have the resources for housing and funding and transportation. It’s also connected to the stress of recovery and financial constraints of that situation.

We also see an increase of new domestic violence cases during the recovery time period. And so one thing for us in emergency management that is really important is to recognize as one that this is a problem in the first place. Most people don’t know about this increase in domestic violence post disaster — so if you know about it, you can do something about it. We can make sure that in emergency management, a local emergency management agency is reaching out to domestic violence shelters in their community long before disaster ever even happens, for example.

Moving forward, what do you think will be some of the biggest challenges that communities will face as a result of climate-driven and societally exacerbated disasters? What can communities do to increase their resilience or to ensure they are given adequate resources for relief and recovery?

The biggest challenge and most immediate challenge is going to be funding. We’re already seeing how our emergency management system is overtaxed and losing its capacity to respond. Right now we don’t have a plan for how to increase the capacity of the system. One thing I don’t think people have really come to realize yet is how expensive the cost of inaction on climate change is actually going to be, not just as a globe or as a country, but in individual communities. At the local and state level, governments are really dependent on the federal government for disaster related funding. And in the absence of the federal government seriously increasing that funding, a lot of communities are headed for a pretty uncertain future.

My best advice for communities who have a really clear view of how they’re gonna be affected by climate change specifically is to start organizing now. If you’re on the coast, even if you think you have another 10 years before flooding becomes a real problem for your community, start organizing now. Getting funding to do adaptation, to do hazard mitigation, takes a long time. We’re talking years and decades in many cases to get the funding for these kinds of projects. And so the way that you navigate through this huge bureaucratic system to get this funding is by applying public pressure and getting your representatives in Congress to fight for your communities specifically. And so the sooner that you begin organizing, the sooner that your neighborhood can start grassroots organization to start that advocacy work, to start building the relationships, to start understanding the process that you’re going to need to go through to get that funding.

Of course, some communities have more political power, more political sway than other communities — this is particularly true if you’re looking around and you’re in a small community that tends to be ignored. But the reality of the situation is that that begins and ends with us. And so we need to organize and be ready for what the future brings and to navigate those systems.

That’s my number one recommendation for people in terms of climate change broadly.

But more specifically for disaster policy issues: you’ve got to vote. And you need to be paying attention to who you’re voting for. Not just at the national level, but in local elections. It really matters who your mayor is, it matters what they think about the climate crisis and it matters how they understand disasters, how they envision your community needing to change in the future. These are really hard questions, and so you need as many leaders and advocates for your community as you can possibly get. So with local politics, that’s at least one place to start.

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lodelss · 5 years

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A Stimulus Plan for the Mutual Aid Economy

Livia Gershon | Longreads | November 2018 | 9 minutes (2,142 words)

If you’re a highly educated white man without serious disabilities—a description that, not incidentally, fits a large majority of people who make and write about policy in the United States—the economy probably looks like this to you: a web of financial transactions between individuals and companies, with support and guidance from the government. To Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha—a disabled, chronically ill writer and performer—it looks completely different. “Your life is maintained by a complex, non-monetary economy of shared, reciprocal care,” she writes in her new book, Care Work. “You drop off some extra food; I listen to you when you’re freaking out. You share your car with me; I pick you up from the airport. We pass the same twenty dollars back and forth between each other.”

Throughout the book, Piepzna-Samarasinha details how activists in the disability justice movement, led largely by LGBTQ people of color, support and advocate for one other. She describes a neurodivergent person bringing shawarma orders to a social justice conference, crowdfunding campaigns to pay for rehabilitation, and collectively-written best-practice guidelines for closed captioning. When wildfires hit California last year, she writes, “Over and over, it was sick and disabled folks—particularly folks with chemical injuries, environmental illness, asthma, and other autoimmune conditions who had been navigating unsafe air for years—sharing the knowledge that being sick and disabled had already taught us.”

From the usual perspective of policymakers, all this might sound like barely a footnote to the larger systems that deliver the goods and services we depend on. But the labor that Piepzna-Samarasinha describes is, in fact, an integral part of the American economy. The AARP has estimated that the total value of unpaid care that family members and friends provided to adults with disabilities and illnesses in 2013, the last year it was counted, came to $470 billion. That’s more than two-and-a-half times Amazon’s total annual revenue, and it still only captures a fraction of the work we do for each other outside of paid labor. According to the American Time Use Survey, parents spend, on average, about an hour and a half per day taking care of their kids. If you imagine paying guardians $15 an hour, it would add up to $565 billion per year. (And that still only includes hands-on care, not all the hours we spend keeping an eye on the kids while catching up on email, cleaning up their messes, or trying to get back to sleep after waking up to feed a baby at 3 am.)

Collectively, we might place this labor into something called the mutual aid economy. Mutual aid—work we do for each other out of some combination of generosity and obligation, without money being exchanged—has always been central to societies. In the U.S. today, it’s particularly important in working-class, black, brown, and immigrant communities, where there’s not much cash to pay for Uber rides and emergency babysitters. Yet legislation to support those doing unpaid work is rare—and often controversial.

Policymakers’ neglect of the mutual aid economy causes enormous harm to those who give care—disproportionately women—and receive it.

In some ways, it may seem wrong to consider making soup for a sick friend, taking a disabled grandparent to the park, or playing with your own baby as work. These are often some of the most joyful ways we can spend time; these are activities that give our lives meaning. The trouble is, many—particularly the privileged and career-focused among us who influence public policy the most—lack a vocabulary to describe the labor of mutual aid. Given our market-oriented framework, anything we do for reasons other than money ends up looking either like consumption or like a way of making ourselves (and family members) more employable. Is playing yet another game of Chutes and Ladders with your little niece recreation, or is it a strategy to help her improve the rational thinking skills that will boost her future earnings? Really, of course, it’s neither. It’s part of a fundamental human drive to share emotional and material resources with the people around us. And that has economic relevance, too.

Policymakers’ neglect of the mutual aid economy causes enormous harm to those who give care—disproportionately women—and receive it. There’s a reason children under five are the most likely of any age group to be living in poverty: it’s often impossible for parents to provide necessary care while earning enough money to support their families. The AARP reported in 2015 that more than one in five people had retired earlier than planned to look after a family member, and caregivers aged 50 and older who leave the workforce to look after a parent end up losing an average of more than $300,000 in forgone income and benefits over their lifetimes.

Most caregivers say the work is stressful, and significant numbers report that it’s physically difficult or takes a toll on their health. Yet, according to Amy Goyer, a family and caregiving expert at AARP, many people see caring for their elders as “almost a given” no matter the costs. “You don’t complain about taking care of your loved ones, whether it’s your children or your spouse, or your parents,” she told me. Goyer has been caring for family members all her life. “It’s been financially crippling for me, but I would not change a thing,” she said. “I did what was important to me.”

***

The most obvious way to support care work is simply to pay people to do it. In some cases that’s exactly what happens. People with enough money have always been able to hire help, or to subsidize a family member devoted to caregiving full-time. Since the 1960s, disability rights activists have been pushing for laws and government programs to help people with disabilities live independently; their efforts led Medicaid agencies, the Veterans Administration, and some state and local programs to start paying personal care attendants to provide support with daily tasks like bathing and preparing meals. These programs have enabled some families to hire workers; in some cases, they have allowed family members to receive compensation for some of the care work that they might otherwise be doing for free.

But government agencies sometimes bar spouses or other household members from becoming paid caregivers. Such limitations seem to stem from a belief that spouses ought to provide care for free and that, if funds were available for some of the work that family members are already doing, interest in the program would overwhelm public budgets. (In practice, it turns out that this hasn’t actually been the case in the programs that do permit spouses to be designated care workers.)

In Maine this fall, voters had a chance to approve a referendum to create a universal home care benefit for seniors and people with disabilities. The measure, supported by a coalition of disability rights groups, unions, and community organizations, called for free home care for anyone who needs it, funded by a tax on people with incomes above $128,400. It would also have given home workers the opportunity to join a union and ensure that 77 percent of the program’s funds would be paid to care workers, as opposed to the agencies that employ them. But business groups, home care agencies, and, ultimately, all four of the state’s gubernatorial candidates came out against the measure. “The idea that we’re going to hit 60,000 Maine families and an untold number of small businesses is just going to be a disaster for our economy,” Newell Augur, the chair of a coalition of business and service-provider groups opposing the measure told Maine Public Radio. Opponents also disapproved of the universal nature of the benefit, which would mean that even wealthy seniors would receive public money. The bill was defeated. Organizers still hope to win a similar program through legislative methods, but for now Mainers—like most Americans—must continue cobbling together care for those who need it from extremely limited public and private programs and the generosity of individual caregivers.

We tend to consider paid caregivers as wage workers, but since they’re not just doing it for the money, advocating for themselves can be tricky.

Under Medicaid, family members and unrelated caregivers frequently report that administrators expect them to work more hours than they’re compensated for—and often, because they care about their clients, they do the work anyway. A 2015 study by researchers at the University of California backed up the hours discrepancy with data. “Caregivers are often expected to ‘gift’ hours of care above and beyond what is compensated by formal services,” they found. For example, “Sue,” a paid caregiver of a client with Parkinson’s and depression, told researchers she considered the client, “Jill,” like a sister. When a state budget crisis led Medicaid to cut the number of hours for which she was paid, she still made sure that Jill’s needs were met. But that meant neglecting her own. “Right now, I ask how am I supposed to survive?” she told the researchers. “I can’t have enough water to drink, and I am eating rice with fish sauce and that is still not enough.”

In economic terms, we tend to consider paid caregivers as wage workers, but since they’re not just doing it for the money, advocating for themselves can be tricky. That’s a problem that Caring Across Generations, one of the organizations behind the Maine ballot initiative, is taking on. Formed in 2011, Caring Across Generations advocates for public funding of long-term care and protections for care workers. “Systemically and culturally, we get away with kind of relying on that instinct of ‘Well, no matter what, you’ll kind of go through and sacrifice everything,’” Janet Kim, the communications director of Caring Across Generations, told me. “I think it’s a wonderful thing, our instinct to take care of one another, but we can be taken advantage of. When you look at the economics of it, it just doesn’t work.”

***

Reluctance to support the mutual aid economy is baked into the U.S. tax structure, which encourages paid work outside the home rather than caring labor. The federal child tax credit and earned income tax credit, the two largest programs providing extra cash to families with children, are available only to working parents. And families can only get the maximum EITC if their earnings are quite low: A single mother with one kid can receive $3,461 if she makes between $10,180 and $18,660 a year. Above that income level, the benefit gradually phases out. In contrast, most other rich countries—including Canada, Japan, and almost all European Union nations—pay child benefits that directly compensate families for some of the extra demands of having children.

Piepzna-Samarasinha believes that preserving and expanding Medicaid and other benefits is crucial. Really, just about any policy that would put more money in the hands of working-class people, including those with disabilities, would help the mutual aid economy to thrive. The trouble is, the system as it exists spends a lot of its energy limiting care—rejecting applicants who don’t seem “disabled enough” even if they can’t get jobs, along with those who make too much money—and focusing on the dangers of fraud (which does exist, but is mostly committed by dishonest healthcare companies, not individual recipients). “It comes from a fundamental belief that disabled people are lying,” Piepzna-Samarasinha told me. “If the system were designed by disabled people it would look really different.” If she were in charge, a policy for the mutual aid economy would start by compensating caregivers for years of neglect: “Providing a kind of back-pay for those inadequate benefits could let people finally go to the dentist, or get physical therapy,” she said.

No one is truly independent, and that’s OK.

One policy idea that would guarantee support for disabled people and caregivers is a universal basic income. In a way, that’s the ultimate policy support for mutual aid—money paid to all of us, with the understanding that all of us do one kind of work or another that we’ll never receive a wage for.

That’s a wild dream, however, especially in a country where the Republican Party is continuing its efforts to cut Medicaid and the rest of the (already inadequate) structure for supporting caregiving. Democrats will likely be stuck largely playing defense at least until 2020. But it’s just such fantasies that have driven the disability justice movement this far. “It’s radical to propose choice in care,” Piepzna-Samarasinha explained. “The charity model is just ‘we’re going to give you these crumbs.’ There’s an underpinning, quite honestly, of ‘You’re really lucky to be alive. You don’t work. You can take what we give you.’”

Disabled people can show the rest of us that we all have things we can contribute to each other, whether we work for pay or not, Piepzna-Samarasinha added. No one is truly independent, and that’s OK. “We’re really taught that having needs is the worst thing in the world,” she said. “One way or another, everybody who’s sick and disabled comes to the place where you’re just like ‘OK, I have these needs, and it’s not the most horrible thing in the world to have them.’”

***

Livia Gershon is a freelance journalist based in New Hampshire. She has written for the Guardian, the Boston Globe, HuffPost, Aeon and other places.

Editor: Betsy Morais

Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel

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flauntpage · 6 years

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Running Thread: 2018 Business of Sports Panel

Kyle is doing a panel this morning as part of the Philadelphia Business Journal’s “Business of Sports” conference in Center City. There are actually four total panels and his goes off last, so I figured I’d come down here for the other panels and put together a running thread with some of the more interesting notes from the event.

It started at 7:45 a.m. with a “teams” panel featuring the following folks:

Philadelphia Eagles: Don Smolenski, President Philadelphia 76ers: Lara Price, COO Philadelphia Flyers: Shawn Tilger, COO Philadelphia Phillies: Dave Buck, Executive Vice President Philadelphia Union: Tim McDermott, Chief Business Officer

Notes:

One of the first things that jumped out was a question to Buck, who was asked why Phillies attendance seems to be down. We are, after all, talking about a first place club that just took 2 of 3 games from the Dodgers. Buck explained that season ticket numbers are not what they used to be, currently around 9,500 STH vs. numbers that eclipsed 20,000 during the height of the Chase Utley and Ryan Howard era.

Ticket prices were another topic. Buck pointed out that the Phillies added fun activities for fans with the renovation of the ballpark, things that might not make much money, if any, such as the new climbing wall and mini baseball field. But he pointed out that those intiaitives help the overall gameday experience and give things fans to do. Buck also added that even though the best seats in the house might be expensive, you can still get that $15 to $17 dollar ticket in the upper levels that isn’t going to break the bank. He also mentioned adding a beer garden in a future renovation.

McDermott, who is Sean McDermott’s brother, has put a lot of time and effort into the Union’s ticketing department in recent years, adding numerous staff. He also talked about the purchase of Chester land that comprises a mile of waterfront property for future development. Previously, there had been a lot of issues with private lot managers who owned different chunks of land along route 291. The process of acquiring a single tract of land is moving forward slowly down there.

Tilger was asked specifically about the Wings NLL expansion franchise, and talked about the unique ability to start from scratch with a new team. He projects season ticket holders to number 4,500 by the end of the summer and mentioned that the team has brought in two founding sponsorship partners on three year deals that crest one million dollars each. He also spoke about the ability to analyze “pain points” other teams are currently dealing with – Flyers included – and strategize around that.

The final question was this – what would you change about your sport?

Buck – stop messing with it, not a fan of baseball’s designated hitter rule

Price – relax rules that determine how NBA teams can work internationally (I believe the league office controls this from the top down)

Smolenski – non-answer about continuing to evolve the game

McDermott – competitive balance, stadiums that hold 65,000 fans (Atlanta), others that hold 20,000 fans (Union), that creates economic imbalance, which gives high-end teams the ability to spend more on elite players

Tilger – no answer

Panel 2: eSports

John Fazio, CEO of N3rd Street Gamers Mike Prindiville, CEO of Team Dignitas Anthony Pizzo, PhD Candidate at Temple’s Fox School of Business

Notes:

The panel started out with a shout for your team, your town, your Philadelphia Fusion, which does not live or play in Philadelphia.

Anyway, the first topic was a discussion on how eSports has a lot of crossover opportunities. The Sixers (HBSE), for example, own Team Dignitas. The Flyers (Comcast) own the Fusion. So both of these entities exist under an umbrella corporation that comes with existing tools and resources and connections for business and marketing purposes. That’s different from, say, the Union, who are independently owned by a New York businessman with a small group of local investors.

Fazio and Prindiville both spoke of the city’s tech scene and sports fandom as the blend that created a natural interest in eSports. Prindiville said his players train from 8 to 15 hours per day, equating the amount of dedication and time they put into their craft to anything a professional basketball or football player would do. He also spoke about the opportunity provided by the release of new games, which creates a natural evolution for the sport. Whereas football has pretty much been the same sport for a long time, featuring minor rule tweaks each year, a gamer might go from playing Call of Duty to Overwatch to League of Legends, which features new characters, new abilities, and new mechanics. So the learning curve and necessity to adapt is much different in eSports than what traditional athletes and coaches go through.

They also spoke about the importance of the new Overwatch deal with ESPN and Disney. The Fusion will be on ESPN tomorrow night at 7 p.m. for game one of the league final:

The group also touched on the commercialization of the still-nascent sport, which really is just jumping into the waters of sponsorship and marketing. Coca Cola, Comcast, Red Bull, Mountain Dew, and Audi all put money into eSports. Team Dignitas has a partnership with Buffalo Wild Wings. eSports revenues are expected to crest $1.5 billion by 2020.

Panel 3: The Sponsors

Paul Muller,President of Toyota-Tri State Dealers Association Justin Samra, Director of Marketing at the Rothman Institute Paula Sunshine,Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Office at Independence Health Group David O’Malley, President & Chief Operating Officer of Penn Mutual

Notes:

This isn’t my area of expertise, so I’ll try to keep it simple.

Sunshine explained how sports teams are ideal partners because fans are loyal, passionate, informed, and engaged. When they’re “in,” they’re 100% in, so from a strategy standpoint, it makes a lot of sense to build relationships with those types of people.

Muller spoke about how sponsors used to just buy a radio or TV spot, and that was pretty much it. Now, social media and non-sports areas at stadiums and arenas can be used specifically for sponsorship opportunities. He specifically mentioned Talen’s “Toyota Plaza,” which is an area just outside of the stadium featuring kids’ activities and food trucks and tables. Clients can bring their children to play soccer or throw a football before the game, and there are also all sorts of previously non-traditional branding opportunities available. For instance, “Toyota” is scrawled in huge letters on an inflatable “bounce house” type of thing that actually serves as a barricade for a mini soccer field. That wasn’t the case back in the day.

Muller also spoke about how the evolution of broadcasting aids sponsors. Years ago, you maybe had 3-4 cameras shooting one game. Not anymore, so Toyota also has a deal that puts their name on the Phillies bullpen. Muller pointed to how filming of the game has changed to the point where the bullpen gets a lot of television time, which gets more eyeballs on the brand. There are different avenues to explore based on studies of consumer habits and the evolution of media. He also added that one third of his budget is now allocated to digital advertising, up from 0% in 2003.

O’Malley pointed out Penn Mutual’s involvement with rugby, explaining that he feels like the brand can grow along with the sport. In that regard, Sunshine added that she’s paying close attention to the eSports movement. Samra mentioned that he hired a former Flyers employee to specifically monitor their sports activities and make sure those sponsorships and campaigns were being executed fully and properly. It’s one thing to dump a bunch of money into something, but the other half of it is making sure you’re getting the appropriate amount of engagement in return, be it web page impressions, sales, phone calls, appointments, etc.

Samra also pointed out the fleeting nature of the sports business as presenting a challenge for sponsors. He told a story about a marketing plan that used Jeremiah Trotter as a featured personality, then they had to scramble and back track because Trotter left the Eagles a short time later. That’s not usually a problem when creating a non-sports campaign.

Panel 4: Sports Media

Spike Eskin, Program Director for Sports Radio 94 WIP Brian Monihan, President of NBC Sports Philadelphia Kyle Scott, Founder & Editor of the website you’re currently reading Donald Hunt, Sportswriter at Philadelphia Tribune

Notes:

Spike says the Sixers are gonna win 48 games next year, which I think is low. I’ll say 53. But we’ll save those predictions for September.

RE: content and the news cycle, the entire panel agreed that success might not even the most important thing to determine what people are reading or talking about. Sure, the Eagles got most of the buzz last year as a Super Bowl winner, but Spike and Kyle both highlighted the Sixers getting a ton of attention during the Process era, simply for the fact that the team was doing something different and unique. So even though they were losing game-after-game, wins and losses weren’t the only determination of what was most interesting. Storylines still trump all.

As for labor and layoffs, moderator Jeff Blumenthal brought up the recent trim at the New York Daily News, which cut its staff from 35 sports people to 9. Hunt feels like the newspaper still does have a future in sports media, but spoke of the need to stay ahead of the curve in a changing world. Monihan says that the bottom line comes down to Philly always being a great sports town, which is enough to justify two newspapers and two radio stations and a robust market in general. Kyle feels like solid content can succeed on any platform. For instance, long-form investigations previously done by newspapers back in the day can be published now online in a digital format as well. The entire industry is merging into a sort of amalgam where the line becomes blurred between TV, radio, web, and print.

“Everybody looks for ways to be relevant on multiple platforms,” Monihan explains. “You’re always trying to help your employees grow in as many ways as possible, and they also have to embrace that change.”

Spike says it’s not necessarily an old talent vs. young talent thing for managers to consider, pointing out the mix of veterans and relative newcomers on WIP’s airwaves (for every Howard Eskin or Angelo Cataldi, there’s a Joe Giglio or Jon Marks). He explained that there are plenty of young people who have no clue what they’re doing, which is absolutely true.

Kyle also touched on the smaller windows that we now work with in the business, i.e., once Woj tweets something, that news is probably consumed and spit back out in 25 minutes. It then becomes old news. Everyone has it. But we have the opportunity to maybe write that story (Report: blah blah blah), in a different way than someone else. Hunt also adds that it’s important to have the “what next” angle ready to go, which I think we try to do at CB. For instance, we did a look at the Sixers’ depth chart after the trade that brought in Mike Muscala and shipped off Justin Anderson and Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot. If the Eagles add Mike Wallace, do a follow-up story on how he performed in Baltimore before coming to Philly. Use video clips and stuff.

Spike also spoke about the discrepancy in podcasting metrics and how different people use different numbers to justify performance in regard to sponsorship. The number of listeners doesn’t matter if people turn off the podcast halfway through and decide not to buy the sponsor’s product. In that instance, there’s no difference between 10,000 and 75,000 listeners, since there’s no activation or engagement. That’s a general thought that Kyle and Monihan both agree with. Hunt points out that he enjoys the “shelf life” of podcasts, which are easy to archive and come back to. You can listen on your own time and don’t have to be on a fixed schedule.

And no, there weren’t any arguments or uncomfortable moments. The whole thing was civil.

Time’s yours.

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Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images Mutual aid networks swelled during the pandemic. How will they continue to grow and serve once it’s over? In the early days of the pandemic, storied community activists and those newly unemployed, or working from home for the first time, came together to join or form mutual aid networks across the country. These groups have spent months building volunteer rolls, creating community connections, and perfecting the use of Slack as a virtual dispatcher. And with states opening back up despite the pandemic wearing on, some are trying to shift the resources and energy to fight a mounting challenge: food insecurity, which will outlast the pandemic. Some projects aim to rewrite entire lanes of our food system: seeds and gardening advice distributed to hubs around the country, a quickly growing network of free fridges to store fresh food, and fleets of cyclist couriers ready to fill in the gaps. The new movement is also centered around food dignity: letting people eat according to their preferences, rather than subsist on whatever donations are available at a food bank that week. “Distribution is the number-one reason why food injustice happens,” says Sasha Verma, a member of the operations team of Corona Courier, a mutual aid group that serves most of New York City. “We are helping all these people who can’t leave their homes. Who was helping them before? I don’t fucking know.” After months managing dozens of daily dispatches across the city, in June, the group decided to pivot to a longer-term strategy it hopes will establish a groundwork for food security, without relying so much on central dispatching or coordination. It set up “pods” of about 50 families and buildings across the city, matching them with couriers who could address their needs more directly, which helps form community bonds. Basically, the plan is a slightly formalized way of matching folks in need of food with neighbors who can help them get it. The pandemic, and its wave of unemployment, attracted tons of first-timers to mutual aid groups; folks who had the privilege of never experiencing food insecurity saw first-hand how hard it is just to get groceries to hungry people. Verma says she joined her group, a citywide grocery and supply delivery effort that attracted more than 500 volunteers, because she had a hunch no government or charity agency was up for the challenge ahead. That sunk in when she found out the state unemployment office was sending people to the newly formed Corona Courier instead of a more established service. “I’m not surprised, because they can’t even do something as simple as what we were doing, which is just buying someone else groceries,” she says. Corona Courier groceries are usually paid for through donations from Abolition Action Grocery Fund (which you can donate to here), an offshoot of the NYC Democratic Socialists of America’s COVID-19 Relief Fund. It’s raised nearly $80,000 so far, mostly from donations of about $25. That kind of small fundraising is key to the future of the efforts, organizers say. Mutual aid groups often have a distaste for some of the traditional nonprofits, which they say are bogged down by bureaucracy and red tape, and that they believe exclude people who don’t fit their specific requirements for aid. One of the guiding missions of this new era of support is to trust in people to take what they need. “When we think about institutionalized food aid — for instance, CalFresh or food stamps or other means of distributing food to people — there’s a lot of means testing,” Gabriela Alemán of the Mission Meals Coalition, a San Francisco mutual aid organization that started in March, told the Extra Spicy podcast recently. “There’s a lot of questioning of, ‘Do these people deserve it? By what parameters do they deserve it? And how do we give it to them by however much we decide that they need?’” Mission Meals Collective, she said, wants to instill trust in its members so there are no roadblocks to people seeking food through its resources, and eliminate the “savior complex” of other institutions that think they know best what a community needs. The group has set up a Patreon membership program to keep donations flowing every month. “We’re not here to police people in what they do or don’t need,” she told the podcast. “I think also people fundamentally don’t understand that under-resourced communities, just because one family or one household might be under-resourced, that doesn’t mean that they completely forget their own sense of humanity for their neighbor.” Liz Baldwin, the founder of Corona Courier, says her group hopes to expand its pod system to more families in the future (they’re still accepting volunteers, too), but keeping the agility of a loosely organized mutual aid group is crucial. “I worked for [a nonprofit], and I just see how bureaucracy can really scramble missions,” she says. “There’s no part of me that’s like, ‘I should take this project and form it into a nonprofit.’ I think you lose the ability to really interact with individuals and try to help them in a way that makes sense for them. A lot of times what happens in nonprofits is that money gets kind of weird.” Food insecurity is not just a pandemic problem: About 11 percent of Americans, or or 35 million people, were food insecure in 2018, meaning they didn’t have enough food to meet the nutritional needs of all members of their households due to money or access, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Advocates have little hope the federal government will help, while state and local governments are strapped for cash and food pantries are being strained. About 40 percent of people visiting food banks during the pandemic are first-time visitors, according to NBC News. Mutual aid as a concept is not new, but it’s never been activated on this scale before, with the entire country on lockdown and so many able-bodied people out of work with nothing to do but help. It doesn’t hurt that this is the first crisis of the digital workflow era, when Slack, Zoom, and Airtable make complex coordination easy. Picking up an aid request can fit between gossip with coworkers on another Slack channel. “We don’t want this to just be a fad. We want this to be a movement where we can be sustainable over the winter,” says Ash Godfrey, one of the people behind Chicago’s Love Fridge project. “This is something that 10 years from now could be a thing. We want people to do it right.” The group was recently contacted by a city alderman to talk about adding a fridge outside of his office. Godfrey wasn’t expecting help from the government, but this connection fits its plans for serving the community for years to come. “We believe that this relationship will give us more credibility as a movement,” Godfrey says. “While we are a community and people’s movement first and foremost, the more support we can get from those with resources and power, the stronger we will be. We are here to stay and having the alderman’s support is affirmation.” The Love Fridge is now working to solve a major roadblock to its longevity: surviving brutal Chicago winters. The group is setting up a volunteer management program (which you can get involved with here) to make sure the fridges are maintained daily, working on blueprints for shelters around the machines, and talking with a community fridge group in Canada about how to survive a bitter January and February. “If there’s a fridge everywhere, can you imagine the lives that would change?” Godfrey says. Free fridges are not a panacea to food insecurity, says Sam Pawliger, who is heading up a community fridge project out of the Clinton Hill Fort Greene Mutual Aid group in Brooklyn. But they do help break down a barrier: Even a person who might feel embarrassed to call a mutual aid group for help could walk down the street to grab a sandwich from a fridge. The fridge has been adding some elements to fill the gaps where food pantries fall short: When organizers found out residents of a nearby shelter were not allowed to bring food inside, they attached a can opener to the fridge and added disposable cutlery to an attached shelf. “I saw this as something that we could stand up quickly to help build solidarity with our neighbors,” Pawliger says, “and as a resource to both combat food waste and food insecurity, both of which are major issues in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill in terms of food security.” Of course, being able to produce your own food with consistency is the most secure thing. This is what Nate Kleinman hopes to inspire with the Cooperative Gardens Commission, which he helped start in March to collect and send seeds to hubs across the country. Kleinman learned the potential of mutual aid when working with Occupy Sandy in New Jersey in 2012, which was key to helping dig out homes and provide supplies to people deeply affected by the hurricane. “In a lot of ways, Occupy Sandy changed the way that the official powers that be in disaster relief do their work,” he says, citing a 2013 report from the Department of Homeland Security that praised the work of the all-volunteer group and its non-hierarchical structure. “There’s a much bigger recognition and importance of mutual aid organizations in disaster relief.” In the start of the pandemic, Kleinman saw a seed shortage coming: Many commercial companies were dealing with a huge surge in demand; others were shutting down entirely. The commission is providing donated seeds and advice for folks with home plots, community farms, and tribal gardens. The project started at the outset of the pandemic, but its goals are targeted at getting people to rethink how they eat. “Seeds are at the root of all food security. This is a ‘teach a person to fish’ kind of issue,” he says. “If we’re giving people what they need to actually grow food themselves, that’s going to be much more sustainable in the long term at addressing food security.” The group is working with local partners across the country to get seeds to disadvantaged or marginalized communities, places that were dealing with food insecurity before the coronavirus hit. Unlike other mutual aid groups, which tend to be located in population centers, the seeds can reach people in rural areas, with hubs in Mississippi, Texas, western North Carolina, and more. So far, they’ve set up 217 hubs across the country and reached an estimated 10,000 gardens, Kleinman says. And they’re accepting more resource donations on their website. Donated seeds are sent in bulk to the group’s Philadelphia base, where they are then repackaged and distributed to the hubs. Some are sent to people through the mail, others have set up distribution hubs in neighborhood libraries and other public areas. Now, the group is focusing on fall seeds: cabbage, leafy greens, root vegetables, radishes, and cover crops, to keep the soil healthy for years to come. “People have taken for granted that there will always be farm workers and farms producing food, and with the clamp down that also happened before the pandemic at the border, the challenges for migrant workers are very real,” Kleinman says. “I think it would be surprising if there weren’t more food shortages in the immediate future.” The idea of exorcising capitalism from food access is an ambitious one. But organizers say the pandemic has shown that community-based mutual aid may be the only way forward. “When I sparked this up, I never thought about, ‘What’s the government going to do for me?’” says Ramon Norwood, the founder of the Love Fridge. “That’s what we’re learning with the pandemic. It’s not enough. It shouldn’t just be the bare minimum.” Tim Donnelly is a Brooklyn-based freelance reporter and editor. Follow him on Twitter. from Eater - All https://ift.tt/31RetWc

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